Talkeetna residents consider special land use district

MAT-SU -- Last March Talkeetnans voted against creating a governmental body and becoming a city, but another proposal now being heard by the planning commission may allow the community some say in its development without instituting a traditional form of government.

The Mat-Su Borough Planning Commission will be at Talkeetna's elementary school gym at 6 p.m. Monday to hear the community's perception of a proposed special land use district ordinance.

Special land use districts, or SPUDs, are tools communities can use to guide future growth. Alaska law states they must be paired with a comprehensive plan in order to be enforceable, and when the two are combined, they can work to help a community protect historic areas, preserve an area's charm or limit the impact of offensive or dangerous land uses. SPUDs and comprehensive plans are available to any Valley community and can be put together with the help of the borough planning department staff.

The community of Sutton, last year, completed a SPUD they had been working on for eight years. That plan deals specifically with areas affecting the Sutton community, disallowing maximum-security prisons, halfway houses and court-ordered alcohol and drug treatment centers, for example.

Talkeetna's SPUD has been even longer in the making. As background in his letter to the borough's planning department in support of the SPUD, Billy Fitzgerald, owner of Denali Trekking Company in Talkeetna, said he had worked on the Talkeetna Comprehensive Plan. That plan was approved by the borough assembly in January 1998, after 10 years of work. Fitzgerald said the community then found out that the document was "toothless" and needed to have an accompanying SPUD to make it effective. Although work started on a SPUD, Fitzgerald said it didn't get far.

"These processes were stalled and eventually disintegrated for several reasons, the most glaring being a lack of understanding of the meaning and consequences of a Special Land Use District," Fitzgerald wrote in a Dec. 16 e-mail to the planning department.

Like Sutton's plan, Talkeetna's proposed SPUD deals with issues directly related to the Talkeetna community. Protecting Talkeetna's character figured largely into the plan, with portions of the ordinance limiting development in favor of such preservation. In the downtown area, for example, the plan states that one goal is to "maintain the pattern of compact development traditionally found in the area, with small simple buildings, historic character, mixed commercial and residential uses …"

Not everyone agrees with the various requirements in the proposed SPUD. Matanuska Electric Association, for example, sent a comment letter objecting to the buffers and stipulations for clearing land and asking that "Utility Facilities" be excerpted from the entire document.

"Please be advised that if the plan as written is adopted over our objection, MEA will not be able to hook up new electrical services because of buffers, and eventually power to Talkeetna will have to be cut off because of clearing restrictions," wrote Keith Quintavell, MEA's right-of-way administrator.

Lee Sharp, vice-chair of the borough's planning commission, said the public hearing will be a chance for area residents to voice their opinion or recommend changes to the proposed SPUD. Afterward, planning department staff will likely incorporate the suggestions offered at the hearing and present a revised document to the commission at an upcoming meeting for further review. If the commission decides to make a recommendation, the plan will be forwarded to the assembly, along with the recommendation, where it will see another public hearing. Barring any scheduling conflicts, it's possible the community could have a SPUD in place by spring. And some residents say the sooner the better.

"The SPUD … represents the coming together of diverse views and, as such, much compromise on all sides," said community member John Strasenburgh in a comment letter. "It strikes an excellent balance between the independence we all came here for and the absolute necessity for us to have a means of influencing our future."